How enterprise democracy can transform capitalism: interview with French scholar Marc Fleurbaey

In an interview with Belgium’s main French-language daily Le Soir, Marc Fleurbaey (research director at CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research) shares the conclusions of his research, partly based on Amartya Sen’ work on the welfare economy.

He notes the gap between democracy and the functioning of the economy, in particular within the enterprises. When talking about economic democracy, Fleurbaey gives the example of the Mondragon group in the Basque autonomous region of Spain. He argues that worker-members need to shoulder a lot more responsibilities than ordinary workers, but in turn enjoy more decent and more secure jobs. He considers the worker-member status (which in the cooperative movement we call “worker ownership”) as a way to transcend wage-based labour and imagines a campaign of consumer sympathy for enterprises with a democracy label.